Tips on using the Rocketbook

My Rocketbook is a staple of my daily work. I absolutely love writing, and I love to think on paper. I also have to do a lot of calculation, and for that pen and paper can’t be beat. But I am also terrible at organizing my notes, and my cupboard was always filled with old notebooks that had work that I wasn’t really using, but didn’t want to throw away.

Of course, this is a terrible system. I had different notebooks for each subject, and trying to pick up a line of reasoning from months (and sometimes years) ago was impossible. Whilst not the perfect solution, the Rocketbook is definitely a step in the right direction.

Rocketbook

For those of you who don’t know it, the Rocketbook is essentially a portable whiteboard. It comes with an app which makes it easy for you to upload your notes to the cloud, or email them, and is usable over and over again. This has made my life a lot easier in daily life and also when traveling – I don’t have to carry extra notebooks with me, and my notes don’t get lost or forgotten. After a few years though, it gets hard to write in, in such a measure that I was considering ditching my current Rocketbook altogether and getting a new one. However, there are two things you can do to ensure that your notebook still works for years to come:

If you’re using Pilot Frixion 0.7 mm pens, stop! The 0.7 mm is my go-to pen size, whether it be the Pentel (some of my all-time favourites) or the Frixion. Problem is, after a few years the Frixion pens do not want to write properly in the Rocketbook any more. An easy alternative is to simply switch to 0.5 mm pens. The difference in enjoyment is immediate – they write better, dry faster and clean better.

Pilot Frixion Pens

Get yourself another microfiber cloth. Even assuming that the cloth that comes with the Rocketbook is pristine, I find that moistening one side of it and drying with the other does not give me the results I desire. So I got a new microfiber cloth from the dollar store, and now when I clean I dampen the original cloth entirely, and use that to wipe the pages. I then dry them with the extra, completely dry cloth. Important: every ten or so pages, completely rinse out the cloth you do the first wipe with.

Microfiber cloth